How do you rate your childs education compared to your own?

[CodandherBeau]

just following on from the other thread.

Do you think your child's education is better, worse or about the same as your own?

I do know that we now teach some of the A level Physics sylabus from the text book that I used at O level! Every time I go into the lab after the physics teacher I get a cold shudder caused by all the bad memories of that book!

Roisin - yes I love teaching Critical thinking... It is fun to do, but where I teach, it is quite exams focussed so perhaps not as interesting as it could be!

As for lowering of grades - hell yes! I went to a conference a few years back, and the chief examiner there admitted (off the record of course!) that what was now an 'A' grade (in about 1999) would only have got a 'D' just 10 /15 years before!

Even in the seven years I have been teaching, I can see standards declining, syllabi becoming easier and more predicatble etc. Nowadays, its all about jumping through the right hoops and that's it! But I'll get off my soap box here!!

It was Alan Rickman who said "We're the first generation to be teaching our children less than we know"

It makes me and

I really loved my experience of education. I fondly remember those units we used to stick together in infant school, the cooking area, the cukes and toms we grew. At juniors we studied time and weather and wrote poems and stories and learned times tables. And watched 'How we used to live' to learn about the early part of the C20th.

I can't remember learning about specific artists though e.g. producing pics like Clarice Cliff or Van Gogh or doing the Vikings, the Romans, etc until much, much later.

Don't know if it's better or worse, just different. My just 8 year old can recognise Clarice Cliff stuff, Paul Klee paintings, can brief you on the Great Fire of London and Samuel Pepys, can tell you about ancient Rome and now Ghana. I don't remember learning anything like that at her age.

Think my infants was better- I liked the seventies "let them pick it up by osmosis in their own time" approach and think the SAT influenced "cram in the three Rs from as early as possible" style leaves teachers little room for manouvre. Which is probably good for those children being taught by the minority of rubbish teachers but also has the effect of stymieing creativity, thinking and going at one's own pace for children generally, perhaps.

The trouble with the nuffield 'let them pick up osmosis on their own' is that for the vast majority of people you'll never get them to deduce it on their own. Newton worked out gravity but I wouldn't if you left me for years! He was a flipping genius and I'm a muppet at higer level physics

I never have been sure where I lie on he Process vs content debate on science. One thing that I do know is that just letting them work through practicals doesn't make them understand better. Over and over you see them ignore the results of experiments that don't fit their model of the world.....and this goes for adults as well as children

The brain has to be taught (trained?) how to think and how to learn. Most creativity requires enormous concentration and discipline.

A big part of my science PGCE was learning about children's misconceptions about the world, and how to overcome these in the classroom. You can't leave it to the children to acquire the knowledge through instinct or whatever.

I was at primary in the 70s & don't remember being left to pick up things by osmosis. At my school we were taught local history, local geography & taken on field trips locally to places that tied in with what we were doing (the harbour, the sea front, Butser hill, Winchester). It made sense, & fostered an interest and an attachment to the place where we lived.

Under the NC there doesn't seem to be any provision for local issues(not in the schools my kids have been to, anyway) which seems a shame.

Agree re science at secondary level, hmb. I wasn't using the word "osmosis" literally but as a metaphor for how my infant school worked. Basically we had a wide range of curriculum activities and resources and used them to learn at our own pace without much formal whole class teaching at all. I didn't have much sense of where my classmates were at in terms of their learning- too absorbed in a bliss of paints, reading books, trying to draw 8s that didn't fall over on their side due to my poor penmanship, writing stories about giants, listening to stories, adoring my teacher. This is very different from what my sons are experiencing. They have lots of whole class drilling in literacy, numeracy and science, practically zero creative stuff, rarely write stories, know where every child is at on the school reading scheme etc. There is very little sense that as young children who are curious and interested in the world they will learn as their development dictates if the right environment, resources and guidance are provided. That, I would guess, was the thinking behind my infants school and it suited me very well. Having said that my sons are thriving in some ways at school, so hopefully the more structured formal teaching of the noughties is suiting them just as the managed chaos of the late seventies suited me.

I think that as with most things in life a happy medium is what is needed. I am reminded of Clive James' autobiography. He was sent a a school for the gifted (primary) and his descriptions of the 'work at your own pace' style of the time were very amusing and accurate I think. He says at one point that left to their own devices one child would be designing a particle accelerator and another would be sticking pictures of girraffs into a scrap book!

I think that most children will need a light guiding hand in order to get them to do some of the less amusing stuff, I've yet to meet many people who found learning punctuation fun (but this being mn I now expect a deluge of people posting that this was the high sopt of their Primary chool experience! ). I also think that the trend to tell children what they are leaning when is generaly helpful....I remember being totaly confused over what we were learning for most of my Primary school time.

I think that structure is helpful, if for no other reason it makes children feel secure. But it has to be structure imposed with a light hand, and directed towrds the needs of the child and the interest of the community as a whole, so better to do local geography and history, say than world wide, at least in the early stages.

regarding science. One of the problems is that many Primary teacher feel very unsure of their own understanding of science and this sometime s shows (I have nothing but the greatest respect for them btw, I couldn't teach the range of sujects that they do, hats off to them). Children arrive with many misconceptions firmly in place and these are not changed much in some Primary schools. I would rather that less be taught, giving the children more time to adopt the real exlanations for science, rather than the over packed NC of the moment which doesn't allow teachers sufficient time to 'unpick' misunderstandings and get the children to change their understanding of the world. For that matter the same thing hold true for secondary school. Vast numbers of kids leave still convinced that plants get their food from the soil, or that a heavy object falls faster than a light on or that electruc current gets used up in a circuit!

My brother was at school in the 70s and his teach had the philosophy that he'd learn when he wanted to. Unfortunately, he never did want to - playing was much more fun for him! It wasn't until he swapped teachers at 7/8 that his new teacher insisted he learnt to read. By then, he was way behind all the other children, and it did seriously disadvantage him for the rest of his school career. Even now, he has an image of himself as 'thick' but he's not, just not academically orientated.

I, on the other hand, loved learning and loved to read etc. and I really floursihed from my 70s/80s education. I loved being able to find out about things that I was interested in, doing the projects and just learning. So I guess its like today - it suited some of us, but not all!

my education was almost non existent. dd goes to the same primary as i went to & although its not brilliant (we live in an area of not so great schools) its much nicer than when i went there.